But Who is Stronger Than Death? Ted Hughes, evidently.

 

This hardback edition of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes is my most treasured possession. I was given it as a leaving present by my friends and colleagues at the Notting Hill branch of Waterstones in London, all the way back in October 2003. I’d worked there for only a year or so, but it was the among the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it was a sad day when I learned recently that the branch is now defunct.

 As can be seen above, everyone signed the endpapers for me, and to this day I can remember them all exactly. One of the many drawbacks of moving around a lot when you’re younger is that you end to replace one group of friends with another, and it becomes harder to stay in touch with the people you leave behind. Anyway, to Ian, Gilles, Mette, Serene, Freddie and (especially) Kirstin – I hope you’re all doing well, wherever you are.

This collected volume had just been published that year, and although I’d been a Ted Hughes obsessive for about a decade there was much in it that I hadn’t read before. I can’t remember the exact moment I became aware of Hughes, but it was almost certainly through reading Sylvia Plath when I was a teenager. (Although now I think of it, I had read his superb children’s book The Iron Man when I was about seven, so Hughes is probably the writer with whom I’ve had the longest relationship.) There’s an inevitable, prurient fascination in the darkness and tragedy that surrounds Hughes’s life, and we may as well get it out of the way here. As everyone knows, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and Hughes was blamed for it for decades. His lover Assia Wevill then committed suicide in 1969, in identical circumstances to Plath, killing their four year-old daughter Shura before taking her own life. The idea that Hughes was some patriarchal monster forcing these women to kill themselves was common currency in some critical circles for decades, but I think it was definitively cut off by the publication of his late collection Birthday Letters in 1998, and by the publication of his selected letters in 2007. All of the above is biography and gossip, not literature, although it’s clear the colossal emotional pain Hughes suffered from these tragedies fed into his darkest writings in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Seamus Heaney called Hughes ‘a guardian spirit of the land and the language,’ a poet who ‘internalised the historical crises of the British nation and the ecological crises of planet earth’, and it was this completeness of poetic vision that first drew me to his work; his vivid strangeness, the perspective on the natural world that was somehow both tender and fierce, alive to violence and death at the same time as seeing those struggles as inherent and valuable parts of a greater and eternal whole. I suspect most readers of Hughes find initial value in his animal poems and his poetry of the natural world, the early lyrics from his first collections The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. Poems like the much-anthologised ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Jaguar’, or ‘Pike’ and ‘Wind’ show this early gift for embodiment and a richly unsentimental sympathy. Sometimes it feels as if this perspective is more empathetic than sympathetic, as though it’s coming from within the natural world rather than being imposed on it from outside. Alice Oswald, the clearest inheritor of Hughes’s mantle, describes him as less of a natural poet than a preternatural one, his animals emerging from some dark, metamorphic space, changed by his knowledge of the deep roots of mythology and folklore. The startling adjectives and adverbs imbue these creatures with shocking strangeness; they are estranged from our common, desultory understanding of them. The jaguar in his cage ‘[…] hurrying enraged/Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes/On a short fierce fuse’. A sparrow ‘whets his stub weapon’ on a branch in ‘Sunday Evening’, and in ‘Thrushes’ the birds seem less like humble garden visitors than heralds of cataclysm: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,/More coiled steel than living’.

It would be a mistake to see the Hughesian eye in this period turned only to the animal life that surrounded him though. Contemporary politics was of no interest, but Hughes had an unusually intense identification with the bloody horrors and sacrifices of the First World War, which puts him in much closer communion with the war poets Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones and Robert Graves (especially the last two) than you might think. Hughes’s father and uncle were both veterans of that war, and he often spoke of how the Yorkshire valleys where he grew up, well into the 1950s, still seemed in deep mourning for the local boys who had been killed. Poems like ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Six Young Men’ are superb imaginative engagements with battle and human suffering, exploring with anger and compassion the experiences of men like his father.

The prevalence of mythology and folklore in Hughes’s poetry began to intensify into the late 1960s. His 1967 collection Wodwo initialled the change, a combination of poetry and short stories that seems formally inventive for the period. (‘Rain Horse’, later reprinted in the story collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom, is one of the best short stories ever written.) It was 1970’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow that solidified Hughes’s deepening and incredibly dark obsession with the lineaments of folk tales and myth, something that continued for much of the decade that followed. The sequence is an unstable text, with Hughes adding and subtracting individual poems from it, hiving some of them off to other collections, or keeping handfuls sequestered in either limited edition pamphlets or uncollected altogether. It was intended to be an epic folk-tale, with Crow as a trickster figure, cowardly and selfish, created by God in some horrified impulse; ‘a black rainbow/Bent in emptiness’, ‘Screaming for Blood/Grubs, crusts/Anything’. Creation itself is a horror, a roiling arena of sexual depravity and bloodshed, investigated by Crow in all his mocking curiosity. This solidification (some would say ossification) of Hughes’s interests and themes  from a natural to a mythological world has an attendant loosening of form. The Crow poems are not so much free verse as a destruction of poetic form and a rough stitching of it back together, in lines and stanzas of savage violence, black irony and bitter sarcasm. The poems are difficult, ugly in places, thrilling, disturbing – ripe for parody in many ways, as only the most stylistically distinct work can be. Hughes was to stick with this more abrasive style in works like Cave Birds, inspired by the grotesque, caricatural work of his friend, the artist Leonard Baskin, and in what might be the strangest book ever written; 1977’s Gaudete. A loosely versified narrative, Gaudete recounts the abduction of an Anglican clergyman into the underworld and his replacement by a duplicate changeling crafted from a rotten tree stump, who then goes on to minister to his parishioners in a distinctly sexual manner. To say that by this point we’re a far cry from the intimate natural histories of The Hawk in the Rain would be something of an understatement.

Hughes’s work slowly returned to a richer and more intimate engagement with his subjects though, the apocalyptic and alchemical interests becoming more restrained (as in his 1989 collection Wolfwatching), and the natural world explored and recreated through more a tender, caressing observation. ‘A Cranefly in September’ is a work of both intimately close detail and visionary transformation, the titular insect ‘blundering with long strides, long reachings’ as it traverses a patch of grass, the poet’s eye imbuing it with a greater valence as he notes ‘Her jointed bamboo fuselage’ and ‘the simple colourless church windows of her wings’. In the end, after adorning the insect with a kaleidoscope of similes and images, and personalising it as ‘her’, the cranefly must also be seen as an evolved creature of matter and chemicals fulfilling its instinctual function: ‘The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate/To plot her through the infinities of the stems.’

Remains of Elmet and River return Hughes to the landscapes of his childhood, while Season Songs, a collection written ‘in hearing’ of children, and Moortown Diary reflect his growing involvement with farming and agriculture. Moortown Diary is surely one of the greatest collections about man’s engagement with the land ever written, an intimate portrait of the bloody realities of farming life that nevertheless finds a strange calm and equipoise in the rough business of dehorning cattle, shearing sheep, and overseeing the birth of calves, ‘Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb’. It is about man’s often vexed relationship not with landscape, but the land; a needed thing, obdurate and stubborn, a dishcloth that must be wrung out for the very last drop of human sustenance.

This balance and contrast between the shamanic Hughes and the Wordsworthian keeper of the land meant that he is probably the only major poet since Tennyson to have made a success of the Laureateship, when he was appointed in 1984. He spoke of the position in explicitly shamanic terms; if the crown is the symbol of the unity of the tribe, then the Laureate can represent and give voice to the spiritual unity of that tribe. Unpromising occasions like the christening of Prince Harry produced poems like ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, a rushing, water-soaked work that flows through the rivers and streams that pour across Devon, an incantatory roll-call of river names that seems to make an implicit, Arthurian connection between the fertility of the crown and the fertility of the land. In a letter from 1979, Hughes noted that all creative work to him was ‘a conjuration, a ritual summoning of all energies associated with the subject matter’.

Two more great works were to follow before his death in 1998. The nourishing, imaginative topography of myth hadn’t left him, and in Tales From Ovid Hughes turned to one of the original sources, adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rich, indecorous poems of an overwhelming blank verse that feels hewn out of stone. Here capricious gods wield infinite power, the transformations of man to animal a metamorphosis of unrivalled horror. Even Martin Amis (a natural Philip Larkin man more than a Ted Hughes man) called the book ‘masterful.’ It was 1998’s Birthday Letters though that sealed the poetic career and capped this later flowering of genius. It was the first time he had engaged in his work with the suicide of Sylvia Plath, and it was clear from this collection of stunned conversations, unflinching and interrogatory, that he had been working on it since her death in 1963. The book was a colossal bestseller, but even if people were reading it for prurient reasons they could not have been unaffected by the emotional power of Hughes’s verse. It won every prize going, and as if to underline its significance as his last word on the matter, he died of cancer only nine months later. Typically, he suspected he had contracted the disease because he had spent too much time writing prose, instead of poetry.

Of all his works Birthday Letters has the most emotional resonance for me. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the shallow, tote-bag slogan idea that literature can be ‘healing’, or that it has some magical analgesic effect (as if a d headache can be shifted by a dose of Shakespeare instead of two paracetamol and a glass of water), but Birthday Letters was one of the only books I could read in the aftermath of my mother’s death in 2012. I would get up early every day that summer and sit in the garden at my father’s house, drinking a coffee and reading and re-reading this book, unable to let it go. It was an anchor in many ways, a lifejacket. It felt like Hughes was invocating his grief directly into my heart, and that this shared sorrow was somehow both deepening my own grief and making it more bearable. The poems are concentrated moments, flickers of disbelief and understanding, roving attempts to find meaning in detail and significance in the half-remembered and the painfully exact. The language is sometimes plain, sometimes achingly beautiful. On his first meeting with Plath, in ‘St Botolph’s’, accompanied by another lover: ‘Falcon Yard:/Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow’, or in the starkly titled ‘Error’: ‘I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland./I sleepwalked you/Into my land of totems.’ The collection gives a retrospective understanding to Hughes’s entire body of work, that he was in many ways trying to exorcise deaths that he felt responsible for. In the folkloric mode that he made his own, the condemned man must descend into the underworld in order to be transformed. Here, Hughes is plummeting into his memories, his guilt and grief. He is bringing back the brightest ore, and like a blacksmith is hammering it into astonishing new shapes.

The idea of having a ‘favourite writer’ is a bit reductive, a Top Trumps approach to literature that denies what makes any writer most engaging. Different writers, different books, provide different experiences, and it’s the collective, multivalent voice that most attracts. I could no more take only one book to a desert island than I could take nothing, but if I was forced to choose then perhaps this hardback of Ted Hughes’s collected poems would come with me. He is the complete writer in terms of how much he has infiltrated my imagination and affected the way I view the world, both outside and inside. He is not just a poet or a critic, but a vehicle for the English language, a storehouse of all its richness and power, recharged from the abyssal wellsprings of myth and folklore. There’s something almost autochthonous about him, and his voice is woven through all the thickets of my obsessions and interests. Like Martin Amis (his antithesis, in many ways), he writes with originality, euphony and force of expression; for me, the triumvirate of aesthetic virtues. Michael Hofmann, another poet and critic I revere, boldly said that Hughes was the greatest English poet since Shakespeare. Appropriately, the one book of his I haven’t read is his incredibly idiosyncratic 1992 critical study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I plan to read it this summer, and perhaps then, once I’ve absorbed everything by him, I’ll move on from my Ted Hughes obsession. But I suspect not.

‘There is no better way to know us/Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.’

Publication day, and a book launch

 Thursday 13th February 2025, a day that shall live in infamy...

Yesterday my debut novel 'The Unrecovered' was published, and we had the book launch at Golden Hare Books in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. (A short informative sentence that encapsulates pretty much everything I've been working towards for about 25 years.)

In the afternoon my editor Alison took me around various bookshops to sign stock (which made me feel like a proper writer) and then in the early evening we headed to Golden Hare.

Mary Paulson-Ellis was the best chair I could have hoped for, an incredibly astute reader who steered the conversation into very interesting terrain. It's a strange thing to discuss your work like this, because it forces you to examine much of what is either inchoate or intuitive in your writing, teasing out themes or correspondences of which you might not have been consciously aware. I also did a short reading and fielded questions from the audience, and the hour was over much faster than I thought it would be. It was great to catch up with old friends and to see the novel firmly launched into the uncertain seas of literature. And then to start drinking heavily afterwards.

I have heard other writers speak of a strange sense of anti-climax once a book has finally been published, but it definitely feels like a point of culmination for me, having spent so long trying to get here. Reviews and sales and so on are all out of my hands now, and not really worth worrying about (although obviously I hope for colossal critical and commercial success...) The reviews so far have been great and hopefully there are more to come, but the book is the thing. It's out there now, for people to spot on a table or a shelf in the bookshops, to read if they choose, or to pass over in favour of something else. I certainly hope people take a chance on it.

2025: a look ahead

 2024 is over, and a new year is upon us. I thought I’d write a brief overview of what I have planned for 2025, with the proviso that nothing in writing ever goes entirely to plan, and that projects I might confidently summarise here could easily be dropped in favour of anything that announces itself more forcefully to my mind. With that caveat in place…

The main thing of course will be the publication of my debut novel, The Unrecovered, on 13^th February. The book launch will be at Edinburgh’s Golden Hare Books on that day, chaired (in something of a coup!) by Mary Paulson-Ellis.

Tickets for the launch, redeemable against a copy of the book, can be ordered here:

https://goldenharebooks.com/products/the-unrecovered-launch-event-with-richard-strachan-thursday-13th-february-2025

Pre-orders for signed and dedicated copies are available here:

https://goldenharebooks.com/products/the-unrecovered-by-richard-strachan-signed-and-dedicated-pre-order-13th-february-2025

And here’s a link to various other places where it can be preordered: https://linktr.ee/richstrach

It goes without saying that I’ve never had a book launch before, although I’ve been to plenty of them in my time. To say that the prospect fills me with raw terror would be an understatement, but I’m just pushing all the anxieties to one side for the moment. Hopefully it can be something I’ll actually enjoy once it’s up and running. Either way, I will finally have a proper novel out there in the wild.

 

Other than that, I’ll have the general round of edits to do on my second novel. I submitted the third draft in mid-December, and no doubt there will be lots of work to do on it during the year to get it into shape. It’s changed quite a lot since the first draft, but I’m comfortable with where it sits now.

I’ll also be trying to finish the first draft of a third novel, the final volume of a tentative thematic trilogy all about war, British history, archaeology, landscape and myth. I made a pretty good start on this in the second half of 2024, and hopefully I can get this into some vaguely completed form by summer 2025. After that there will be the usual rounds of intensely self-critical editing and redrafting etc before I can submit it.

Assuming that all goes to plan (see above), I want to spend the second half of 2025 looking over and redrafting a novella and some short stories for a possible collection. Most of the short stories have been published before, in various magazines, but the novella is something I’ve never managed to place anywhere. I’m intensely proud of it all the same, it’s like the distilled essence of every subject and style I care about the most. It was around 60,000 words the last time I checked, and ideally I’d get it down to about 35,000. The collection would be a bit more formally experimental than the novels I’m currently writing; less character and plot, more style and imagery.

On top of that (and already this seems a ridiculous amount to try and pack into one year), I want to start some very early sketches and notes towards a short novel I’ve had percolating in my head for a while. Again, this would be a more formally experimental piece, but of everything I can dimly perceive in the future it’s the work that’s most insistently demanding my attention. I wouldn’t start work on it properly until 2026, assuming my interest in it doesn’t flag, but I want to start outlining and researching and thinking about it when I’ve got the time.

 

Of course, none of this takes into consideration the usual unexpected life-events that always throw your plans off-track, and I’ve got a few events pencilled-in around the publication of The Unrecovered which will take up some time. But if I can get into a pretty steady work rate, I think much of this will be achievable. I’ll look back over it on New Year’s Day 2026, and that hollow laughter you’ll hear will be me contemptuously scorning my optimism…

Book review: Through the Hedgerow, by Jonathan Rowe

 

Apart from a brief period with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay when I was about thirteen, and a briefer period trying to interest my children in Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve never been one for actually playing RPGs. They take too long, it’s hard to find people who get exactly the same things from them that you do, and more so than any other tabletop game I find them policed by a sometimes insurmountable conceptual barrier. Entering into an RPG campaign requires you to make not just an imaginative leap, but a leap past your own sense of embarrassment and self-consciousness. In the same way a great actor has surmount their sense of self in order to inhabit their role, a roleplayer has to disassociate themselves from the long social and cultural conditioning that says it’s somehow childish for an adult to pretend to be somebody else. All this is my failing, I have to stress. There’s a level of abstraction in other tabletop games (wargames, board games, card games etc) that makes it easier for me to engage with them. Roleplayers, the tabletop elite, are essentially not my tribe.

Saying that, I have long loved reading RPG rulebooks, and they can be a real source of inspiration and enchantment for me. I love the way RPG writers develop a world from the ground up, and the way the mechanics of their games represent how that world is to be interacted with. In this article from about ten years ago, the writer Damien Walter noted how RPGs can be a form of ‘ergodic literature’, the type of texts that make specific demands on the reader and upend the conventional physics of reading. Obvious examples would include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its constant flicking back and forth between text and endnotes, or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, with its footnotes and handwritten inserts, its finicky layout and editorial asides. Perhaps the greatest example would be BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a book that the reader must assemble for herself from a box of separate unbound sections. RPGs, if we’re following this example, provide the reader with a non-sequential system of environmental detail, societal background, character types and material culture. A world has been deconstructed into its constituent parts and themes, and it’s up to the reader to blend them together in a way that makes personal sense to them. Although provided with the same information, no two readers will assemble that information in the same way.

All of which is a long preamble to explain why the roleplaying game Through the Hedgerow has had such an effect on me recently, and why I thought it would be worth reviewing here. Written by Jonathan Rowe, with wonderfully evocative illustrations by Peter Johnston, the book is published by Osprey as part of its Osprey Games division. Billed as ‘A Roleplaying Game of Rustic Fantasy’, Rowe’s work here weaves together several threads that all exert a significant pull on very specific parts of my imagination. In fact, as soon as I read the word ‘hedgerow’ in the title, I not only knew this book would be for me, but that I could make a reasonable guess at the kind of tonal atmosphere Rowe was aiming for.

In summary, Through the Hedgerow is set in four separate era of British history. (I would actually say this is specifically English history, and a game that deals with English themes, but that’s perhaps a separate discussion.) These are: the Age of Swords (the Dark Ages and the Viking invasions); the Age of Plagues (the 17^th century and the civil wars); the Age of Steel (the industrial Victorian era); and the Age of Thunder (the Second World War). Players create characters based on specific types, known as ‘Gentries.’ These can include more conventional figures like Hodkins (highwaymen, adventurers), Heathen Clerks (priests and priestesses who follow Heathen Saints) or Motleys (morris dancers, wandering vagabonds). It can also include more esoteric figures, like Tomnoddins (humanoid spider-creatures), Flayboglins (animate scarecrows) or Ouzels (bird-headed aristocrats). Plunged into a hidden world where the Light battles eternally against the Dark, the players are plucked from their home age and have to negotiate the maze-like hedgerow, until they arrive in one of these four Ages of England, where they will have to investigate and defeat the machinations of the Dark. Rowe is explicit here that, unlike other RPGs, his game does not privilege violence; player characters are on the whole not warriors who solve every problem with a sword. The missions they undertake might involve rescuing a village woman accused of witchcraft in the 17^th century, or recovering a sacred relic stolen from a church by a Viking warband. The game stresses the importance of investigating, healing and restoring balance. The characters are supposed to re-establish a sense of equilibrium between the Light and the Dark, as much as exalt one over the other.

I’m not qualified here to talk about the mechanics of the game, but Rowe has clearly tried to move them away from the standard Dungeons & Dragons-inspired system of player stats, checks and bonuses, and he discusses this at length on his blog, Fen Orc (which is well worth a read for his ideas about RPGs more generally). What I’m most interested in here is the source material and the inspirations that have fed into this game, which Rowe details in the appendix and on his blog. Most clearly, Through the Hedgerow draws on Susan Cooper’s superb series of children’s books, The Dark is Rising sequence, as well as on Alan Garner’s approach to time and deep history. Rowe also notes the influence of 1970s TV serials, like Doctor Who, Children of the Stones, Worzel Gummidge and Catweazle. I would also say that there are links to a whole host of texts in the ‘British Weird’ or folk horror tradition, from the holy cinematic trinity of The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, to TV plays like Penda’s Fen and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. Even the haunting 2000AD comics series, The Journal of Luke Kirby, is drawing from a similar well. The Four Ages of the game are stations of the secular cross on which Britain has hung much of its quasi-mythological understanding of itself in recent years, from the reign of Alfred the Great to the chaos of the civil wars, or from Victorian materialism to the embattled siege of the Second World War. The game draws on archetypes or cultural touchstones buried deep in the British psyche, from the witch hunter to the wounded Battle of Britain pilot, the wandering wise man, the holy fool haunting the hedgerows. If the figure of Cole Hawlings in The Box of Delights, a magical Punch & Judy man engaged in some cryptic conflict between the Old and the New Magic, tugs on your imagination in any way, then Through the Hedgerow is the game for you.

Above all, I think this book is about the liminality of the countryside, the edgelands between the town and the open fields beyond. It conjures up a mysterious world of briar patches and bramble, of the mist threaded through the stubble of a wheatfield while crows gather in the hawthorn. It’s part of an imaginative, almost spiritual cultural response that sits adjacent to Mackenzie Crook’s Detectorists or the music ofJohnny Flynn, and although it’s explicitly a fantasy game it has as much to do with the writings of Melissa Harrison and Robert Macfarlane as Susan Cooper or Alan Garner. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a game or a world for environmentalists, but its emphasis on the rural and where the rural overlaps with the urban, does give it a certain political salience. The ‘folklore turn’ of much modern literary culture is arguably drawing on ideas of rewilding and environmental renewal, even on Derrida’s ideas of Hauntology (‘Re-enchantment is Resistance’, as Hookland says …), and Through the Hedgerow is embedded in that folk horror tradition. Beyond politics though, it has captured the sense that even though we are only passing through the landscape, our ephemerality can still leave a significant trace upon it, and that there is enchantment in the corner of your eye if you could only see it. It’s something glimpsed on a patch of waste ground on Bonfire Night, or from a train window as you pass through summer fields at dusk. It’s there in the drift of dead leaves on a lonely autumn afternoon, or the call of a raven on the edge of a sodden moor. This is a deeply imaginative piece of work, and it suggests you only need to make a small leap of the imagination to experience it for yourself.

If not exactly a work of fiction then, Through the Hedgerow has still provided me with what fiction does best; it has altered, to the smallest degree, how I look at the world. My lunchtime walks along the old railway tracks near where I live, with the autumn trees hanging over the path, now take on a new resonance. The call of a tawny owl at dusk from the cemetery along the road carries an extra thrill. A fox slipping through a back garden is an emissary of something larger and more mysterious. The hedgerow is thinner than it looks; who knows what might lie on the other side?

(Through the Hedgerow, written by Jonathan Rowe, with illustrations by Peter Johnston, is published by Osprey Games, £25, pp272)

 

Stage Two, and a trip to London

 On Wednesday (30th October) I was down in London at the Raven Books showcase event, in the suitably evocative surroundings of the Gothic Bar in the St Pancras Hotel. I was there to pitch The Unrecovered to an audience of booksellers and books media, alongside the writers Nicola Whyte, Holly Watt, Rosie Andrews and Stuart Turton, who were all there to pitch their books too. There was a brief Q&A with my editor Alison, and then there was plenty of time afterwards to chat to people and sample the free booze. More importantly, it was a chance to meet people from the Raven Books and wider Bloomsbury team who I've been emailing for months now, but hadn't actually seen in person yet. Thanks in particular to Alison, Emily, Abi and Therese for making everything far more enjoyable than I'd hoped, and less stressful than I'd feared!

This kind of thing very much doesn't come naturally to me, and it was a step up from the proof drop experience a couple of months ago. I truly hate the cliche of the closeted neurotic writer, but when you spend a lot of your time on your own, it can be quite a strain to force yourself outwards again and dig deep into an atrophied fund of small talk. It's important to do so though; publishing is a business built on the relationships developed between writers, agents, editors, marketing professionals, booksellers and reviewers, and they're relationships that need to be cultivated. Plus, when a publisher offers to put you up in a nice hotel and buy you dinner, any writer worth their salt will automatically say yes, or I don't really know what they're doing in this business.

I had a meeting with my editor beforehand as well, to go over the next round of edits on my second novel. Everything here is on track, so I'll be getting back to work on it over November/December. This was the first time I've been to Bloomsbury's beautiful, labyrinthine offices, an opportunity worth the trip in itself. 

Next up, I've got 1000 sheets of endpapers for the independent bookshop edition of The Unrecovered to sign, which I'm hoping to get done over the next couple of weeks. I haven't quite figured out my approach to this yet, and I've no idea what my signature's going to look like after 999 previous attempts, but I'm hoping to get about 200 signed a day. Perhaps that's optimisitic, but we'll see ... 

Stage One, and a lot of shoe leather

 For the last couple of days I've been going around various bookshops in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, escorted by the incredibly hard-working David (the Bloomsbury sales manager (or as we used to know them in the bookselling trade, the 'rep')), handing over proof copies of my novel The Unrecovered. Day One saw us taking a long drive to St Boswalls and the wonderful Mainstreet Trading, then on to Biggar and Atkinson Pryce, then up to St Andrews and Toppings & Co., then to Linlithgow and Far From the Madding Crowd. Day Two was all the Edinburgh shops, including Argonaut, the Edinburgh Bookshop, Toppings, Waterstones, the Portobello Bookshop, Lighthouse and Blackwells. I was disappointed however to see only one quality bookshop dog (at Lighthouse Books). [Note: the only reason Edinburgh's greatest bookshop, Golden Hare, was left out of the list is because I live with the manager and it seemed a redundant stop on the itinery. I add this only because I wouldn't want the casual reader to think I had an obscure grudge against them.]

The 'proof drop' is something that's developed over the years since I last worked in a bookshop, but the idea is to personally introduce both yourself and your novel to the people who are actually going to be putting it on their shelves and (hopefully) selling the thing. It tends to be more for debut writers, and it's a strange business that doesn't quite come naturally to me. Once I'd eased into it after the first couple of visits I found it strangely enjoyable though. It's actually quite pleasant meeting the booksellers, drinking their tea and eating their biscuits (and bribing them with biscuits of your own), and getting a chance to talk about your book. I quickly developed a short pitch to explain what the novel was about, although by the end of the second day I was fairly sure I never wanted to hear about another 'gothic-historical novel set towards the end of the First World War' again, so who knows what the booksellers thought. David also took what felt like hundeds of photographs of me awkwardly posing outside these bookshops, wielding the proof like a shield, and I've promised myself not to look at them if/when they go up on Instagram.

Apart from providing a little glimpse behind the curtain of how all this works, which wasn't unexpected given how long I worked in bookselling and publishing myself, it seriously underlined for me how much basic pavement-pounding and shoe leather goes into getting a book into a reader's hand. Writing the novel began to seem like the easy part; the hard part starts when sales and marketing roll up their sleeves and get cracking.

So, Stage One is complete: the proofs have gone out, and supportive quotes are being gathered (which deserves a blog post of its own). Next up is the Raven Books showcase in London at the end of October, when I'll have to talk about the novel at scale...

Summer writing

 Last week I had a Zoom meeting with my editor about the draft of my second novel, by the end of which both of us were on the same page about what needs to be done for the next draft. This will take me through the summer and into September, after which the next book should be well on track.

Because I tend to obsessively go over any piece of work again and again before I submit it, any editorial feedback can sometimes feel quite destabilising. It's one of the most essential parts of the process though - you need that second set of eyes to look at your story and point out where the pace flags, where some characters need to be brought up in the mix and others turned down, or where themes need further refining. For me, the flipside of obsessively polishing a novel before submitting it is that as soon as I get feedback I can instantly veer in the other direction, ruthlessly cutting out swathes of text that no longer seem essential. It's a fine balance, but that process of redrafting can also be one of the most pleasurable in this whole strange business of writing and publishing a novel. Getting into the meat of the thing, seeing how the bones and the nervous system all fit together, makes you feel like some feverish Dr Frankenstein. At the end of it all, you might wince when you notice all the sutures and joins, but at least the creature lives.

So, as the summer begins, I have in front of me a print-out of the typescript, and I look on it with a cold and merciless heart. The body is before me; let us see if I can give it life.